Terry Winter's "Good Government" 1984

Terry Winter's "Good Government" was painted in 1984, which would make it about 28 years old.  There is a certain allure to the massive painting, the straightforward hierarchy of the forms--minerals on the bottom, multicellular forms floating like strange enigmas (could these things actually evolve into intelligent life?) above.  The organization of these forms necessarily evoke an invisible grid of sorts.  The use of this sort of "flat" grid would it seem have its roots in cubism but a more direct predecessor of Winter's 1984 painting is this Philip Guston masterpiece of 1970:

Philip Guston, "Flatlands," 1970; Oil on Canvas; 70 x 114 1/2 inches (178 x 291 cm).

Where Guston's painting invokes tangible cultural symbolic images of post-McCarthy America, Winter's nonhierarchical scheme of minerals and organisms in cellular multiplication presents one with an image of a certain detached, non-grotesque vision.  Instead of angst, one senses a much cooler affect.

And this takes me to his most recent show of "Tessellation Figures," which was on view at the Matthew Marks Gallery this past winter.

All at once, I had the sense that after many years where he concentrated on the linear zip of computational graphs and elliptical grids, Winters was somehow reaching back to his thoughts of three decades prior, and integrating spores, minerals, scales, other organisms obliquely into his work.  The patterns of colors, though organized in fields of adjacent hues, evoked certainly the potential energy of larvae breaking out of their nests, ready to invade and digest.

The hierarchy of the forms though are no longer over a stable up and down grid as in "Good Government" but centrifugal at times, wave-like at other times, and one senses the space evoked is no longer planar but ultimately in the fluidity of the liquid state, where up and down, left and right does not govern the correct reading of the paintings.

Taken from a completely different context, I quote the end of a recent article by Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times to end:

"There’s a metaphor at play. A free society consensually accepts its governing burdens and principles. Constraint and freedom: the essence of good architecture and a healthy culture."

Replace the word "architecture" with the word "art" and you would have have in essence the work of Terry Winters.

And as a footnote, one wonders if this other painting by Philip Guston of 1971 was not referenced by Winters:

Philip Guston: Farnesina Garden Rome, 1971